A few months ago I was wondering if there was a way to get an email account as an RSS feed, the purpose being to register that email to various lists and get them in RSS. I got no answers to my request but did find something, in the end I spent about 10 minutes trying to install it and then forgot about it. (not a comment on quality, I just went on to other projects)
Nowadays though, it seems others are interested in getting email newsletters and mailing lists through RSS. This is being brought about by the latest waves of viruses and the exponential growth of spam. The latest idea though is much cleaner, simply publish the newsletter or mailing list straight to RSS, no need to get the email and convert it.
Lockergnome’s RSS ressource page has been involved with this concept since the beginning so you can find good info there. The klog news channel F. Andy Seidl created already lists many interesting articles on the topic.
To me newsletter are a given, it’s absolutely certain that an RSS feed can replace them. You might have noticed though that I also mentionned mailing lists, those are harder to replace since they include input from various people, not just publishing from one source. There is already some thinking along those lines and I’m sure solutions are close at hand.
The whole thing makes a lot of sense and I hope the trend picks up some steam and becomes popular. That would bring all my news within the same application and keep email and text messaging for the personnal stuff.